As the load on maintainers of archives like Metalab, the PSA
site and CPAN increases, there is an increasing trend for submissions
to be processed partly or wholly by programs (rather than entirely by
a human).
This makes it more important for project and archive-file names
to fit regular patterns that computer programs can parse and
understand.
It's helpful to everybody if your archive files all have GNU-like
names -- all-lower-case alphanumeric stem prefix, followed by a dash,
followed by a version number, extension, and other suffixes.
Let's suppose you have a project you call `foobar' at version 1,
release 2, level 3. If it's got just one archive part (presumably the
sources), here's what its names should look:
- foobar-1.2.3.tar.gz
The source archive
- foobar.lsm
The LSM file (assuming you're submitting to Metalab).
Please don't use these:
- foobar123.tar.gz
This looks to many programs like an archive
for a project called`foobar123' with no version number.
- foobar1.2.3.tar.gz
This looks to many programs like an archive
for a project called `foobar1' at version 2.3.
- foobar-v1.2.3.tar.gz
Many programs think this goes with a
project called `foobar-v1'.
- foo_bar-1.2.3.tar.gz
The underscore is hard for people to speak,
type, and remember.
- FooBar-1.2.3.tar.gz
Unless you like looking like a
marketing weenie. This is also hard for people to speak, type, and
remember.
If you have to differentiate between source and binary archives, or
between different kinds of binary, or express some kind of build
option in the file name, please treat that as a file extension to go
after the version number. That is, please do this:
- foobar-1.2.3.src.tar.gz
sources
- foobar-1.2.3.bin.tar.gz
binaries, type not specified
- foobar-1.2.3.bin.ELF.tar.gz
ELF binaries
- foobar-1.2.3.bin.ELF.static.tar.gz
ELF binaries statically linked
- foobar-1.2.3.bin.SPARC.tar.gz
SPARC binaries
Please don't use names like
`foobar-ELF-1.2.3.tar.gz', because programs have a hard time telling
type infixes (like `-ELF') from the stem.
A good general form of name has these parts in order:
project prefix
dash
version number
dot
"src" or "bin" (optional)
dot or dash (dot preferred)
binary type and options (optional)
archiving and compression extensions
Some projects and communities have well-defined conventions for names and
version numbers that aren't necessarily compatible with the above advice.
For instance, Apache modules are generally named like mod_foo, and have
both their own version number and the version of Apache with which they
work. Likewise, Perl modules have version numbers that can be treated as
floating point numbers (e.g., you might see 1.303 rather than 1.3.3), and
the distributions are generally named Foo-Bar-1.303.tar.gz for version
1.303 of module Foo::Bar. (Perl itself, on the other hand, switched to
using the conventions described in this document in late 1999.)
Look for and respect the conventions of specialized
communities and developers; for general use, follow the above
guidelines.
The stem prefix should be common to all a project's files, and it
should be easy to read, type, and remember. So please don't use
underscores. And don't capitalize or BiCapitalize without extremely
good reason -- it messes up the natural human-eyeball search order and
looks like some marketing weenie trying to be clever.
It confuses people when two different projects have the same
stem name. So try to check for collisions before your first release.
Two good places to check are the index file of Metalab
and the appindex at Freshmeat. Another good place
to check is SourceForge;
do a name search there.
Take our 
